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They say the day they sailed into town they pulled the fire out of the sun and used it to burn everything down. They say they stood in the ashes of that island, while women and children were being trampled, while good men were being gutted, two men harder than the bones holding them upright, embraced against the ashen night sky, covered in the grit and smoke of their own created nightmare.
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you taught me how to take a punch, mother, but why did you never show me to throw one? the things i learned from you remain: never get familiar, leave no footprints lest you find yourself following them again, never disturb a stone alone in a field, never trust a face you find yourself loving, why must i learn now how the blood of another brings out the green of his eyes, and i feel far too old to be flexing my fingers so the ache in bruising knuckles linger, these bruising knuckles fresh and cracked in his service, his face that is the first taste of whiskey stolen from father frances’s locked cabinet, every time i see it, mother, i burn in the hollow of my empty stomach
i promised you i would never get familiar and on the day you left me on the stoop of st. christopher’s i kept that promise and forgot your face immediately but i’ve awoken for green eyes, i’ve killed for freckled skin and a voice in my ear, i’ve stood and slept for a cutlass pressed gently into my hand, i’ve been hacked away, mother, torn apart for the promise of his grace on my grace, his hands on my throat, before you left, mother , couldn’t you have taken a moment to yell out from the darkness a warning, must i learn for myself how quickly iron warms with blood? oh mother, you taught me to reach for the sword and but he taught me how to wield it
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T hey say their fingers dripped with blood into the foundations like salt in the earth, and only apples and roses grow there now. They say, for strength before the final fight, one consumed the other’s severed limb, bone and all, to keep a part of him with him always, and that the other was the one to feed it to him, bone and all.
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She always used to talk about "the sense God gave me", and never having been a man of God myself, I remember how it annoyed me, felt I was being robbed ownership of my own intelligence even if by a divine being, but recently I'm beginning to think she meant the sense I don’t possess, cannot possibly possess, if I am doomed to repeat all my mistakes forever like Sisyphus, pushing my heart up a hill and sliding under the rock, but Lord, he is different from them, and before I had clung to that, but now I just feel myself clinging to him, adrift in an unforgiving storm, the way he moves around me and with me and above me, the way he fights me in a way they never could - with fist and sword and word and saliva, and giving to me endlessly in ways I never even thought to ask of others.
Unformed, she thought me, or I thought she thought me, with the idea that I had stopped forming, and if I had any sense, God-given or otherwise, I would have stopped like a frozen wave in the dead of her winter, so each time he grabs me and holds me and wipes the blood from my face with his own bare hands, I would stop looking down, checking to see if my feet have started to slide back under the weight of all this love.
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They say they’re thieves and villains, the best that I ever lived and died and lived again, and they say they took the island in a single night. They say, after the sun rose and the screaming stopped, the two men breathed once, together, and set out to see what else was around to steal.
Nightshift - Hugo :: Iron - Woodkid :: Every Other Freckle - Alt-J :: Don’t Wanna Fight - Alabama Shakes :: What the Water Gave Me - Florence + The Machine :: Tell Me (What’s On Your Mind) - Allah-Las :: Spread Your Love - Black Rebel Motorcycle Club :: Dear Fellow Traveler - Sea Wolf :: Same Old Thing - The Black Keys :: You Got the Silver - The Rolling Stones :: My Propeller - Arctic Monkeys :: Lay Down in the Tall Grass - Timber Timbre :: Dream Captain - Deer Hunter :: 60 Feet Tall - The Dead Weather :: The World Ender - Lord Huron :: King and Lionheart - Of Monsters and Men